About Larry Sultan

Conceptual photographer Larry Sultan is widely known for his “Evidence” series (2004), completed in collaboration with Mike Mandel: a collection of repurposed documentary images from the image banks of government institutions, scientific research facilities, and police departments. Reinterpreted for the purposes of institutional critique, Sultan selected surreal and disturbing images of private industrial spaces and inscrutable experiments and scientific procedures. Uncaptioned and void of any accompanying commentary, Sultan intended the simple action of decontextualizing these images to foreground the role of the photographer in shaping and potentially manipulating of the truth. Deeply influenced by West Coast Conceptualism, Sultan spent his entire career exploring the boundaries of different photographic genres, often deliberately obscuring the line between the documentary and the fictional.

American, 1946-2009, New York, New York, based in Los Angeles, California